I’m Arthur Oudeyer, second year student at ISAE-Supaero (Toulouse, France) and I had the pleasure to visit RITMO between April to July as part of my engineering degree. Supervised by Kyrre Glette and accompanied by Benedikte Wallace, the internship focused on mixing interactive evolution, robotics and AI; aiming for automatically designing creative and expressive robot designs.
At the beginning, in May, I had the opportunity to be part of the Tour de RITMO, which was a very nice experience where I had the opportunity to meet many of the RITMO members. This kind of experience gave me the opportunity to understand the importance of workshops for teamwork and enlarge our horizons. Moreover, the food&paper time on every wednesday was really enjoyable and interesting, allowing mixing ideas and discovering new topics.
During the 4 months of my internship, I started by prototyping and evaluating the capabilities of an AI to replace a human evaluator in an evolutionary process. Then I tried to automatically design a robot's morphology according to a simple description in natural language using the AI grader as a reward model. Afterward I explored the same technique but for the robot's controller by evaluating their dynamic behavior. All of the scientific aspect of the internship is available on a website at https://sites.google.com/view/vlm-4-interesting-robots.
This research internship has been very enjoyable and enriching. I really like the RITMO environment, people are extremely nice and the interdisciplinary aspects makes all the interaction very interesting. I also enjoyed discovering Norway and especially its vast forest and lakes. Thanks a lot to Kyrre and Benedikte for the guidance and supervision, and thanks to all RITMO for having me!